By day, young Gilbert Bagnani studied archaeology in Greece, but by night he socialised with the elite of Athenian society. Secretly writing for the Morning Post in London, he witnessed both antebellum Athens in 1921 and the catastrophic collapse of Christian civilisation in western Anatolia in 1922. While there have been many accounts by refugees of the disastrous flight from Smyrna, few have been written from the perspective of the west side of the Aegean. The flood of a million refugees to Greece brought in its wake a military coup in Athens, the exile of the Greek royal family and the execution or imprisonment of politicians, whom Gilbert knew. Gilbert’s weekly letters to his mother in Rome reveal his Odyssey-like adventures on a voyage of discovery through the origins of western civilisation. As an archaeologist in Greece, he travelled through time seeing history repeat itself: Minoan Knossos, Byzantine Constantinople and Ottoman Smyrna were all violently destroyed, but the survivors escaped to the new worlds of Mycenaean Greece, Renaissance Venice and modern Greece. At Smyrna in the twentieth century, history was written not only by the victors but was also recorded by the victims. At the same time, however, the twentieth century itself was so filled with reports of ethnic cleansings on such a scale that the reports brutalized the humanity of the supposedly civilized people reading about them, and the tragedy of Smyrna disappeared from public awareness between the cataclysmic upheavals of the First and Second World Wars.

Since 2007, the conferences organized under the title 'Broadening Horizons' have provided a regular venue for postgraduates and early career scholars in Ancient Near Eastern Studies. Three volumes present the proceedings of the 6th Broadening Horizons Conference, which took place at the Freie Universitat Berlin from 24-28 June, 2019. The general theme, 'Bridging the Gap: Disciplines, Times, and Spaces in Dialogue', is aimed at encouraging communication and the development of multidisciplinary approaches to the study of material cultures and textual sources. Volume 1 contains 17 papers from Session 1: Entanglement. Material Culture and Written Sources in Dialogue; Session 2: Integrating Sciences in Historical and Archaeological Research; and Session 5: Which Continuity? Evaluating Stability, Transformation, and Change in Transitional Periods.

Assyria was one of the most influential kingdoms of the Ancient Near East. In this Very Short Introduction, Karen Radner sketches the history of Assyria from city state to empire, from the early 2nd millennium BC to the end of the 7th century BC. Since the archaeological rediscovery of Assyria in the mid-19th century, its cities have been excavated extensively in Iraq, Syria, Turkey and Israel, with further sites in Iran, Lebanon, and Jordan providing important information. The Assyrian Empire was one of the most geographically vast, socially diverse, multicultural, and multi-ethnic states of the early first millennium BC.Using archaeological records, Radner provides insights into the lives of the inhabitants of the kingdom, highlighting the diversity of human experiences in the Assyrian Empire. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

In Pursuit of Visibility honors the distinguished career of a scholar of Canaan and ancient Israel, Beth Alpert Nakhai. In fifteen diverse essays, Professor Nakhai's students and colleagues celebrate her important contributions to the field of Near Eastern Archaeology, including her research into gender, household, and cult in the Bronze and Iron Age southern Levant, and her tireless efforts to acknowledge and support women in the profession. These essays reflect Professor Nakhai's commitment to combining archaeology and text to reconstruct aspects of ancient life and make those who are marginalized visible in both the past and the present.

The Late Assyrian Empire (c. 900 - 612 BCE) was the first state to rule over the major centres of the Middle East, and the Late Assyrian court inhabited some of the most monumental palaces of its time. The Architecture of Late Assyrian Royal Palaces is the first volume to provide an in-depth analysis of Late Assyrian palatial architecture, offering a general introduction to all key royal palaces in the major centres of the empire: Assur, Kalhu, Dur-Sharruken, and Nineveh. Where previous research has often focused on the duality between public and private realms, this volume redefines the cultural principles governing these palaces and proposes a new historical framework, analysing the spatial organization of the palace community which placed the king front and centre. It brings together the architecture of such palaces as currently understood within the broader framework of textual and art-historical sources, and argues that architectural changes were guided by a need to accommodate ever larger groups as the empire grew in size.

Laying the Foundations, which developed out of the British Museum's 'Iraq Scheme' archaeological training programme, covers the core components for putting together and running an archaeological field programme. The focus is on practicality. Individual chapters address background research, the use of remote sensing, approaches to surface collection, excavation methodologies, survey with total (and multi) stations, use of a dumpy level, context classification, on-site recording, databases and registration, environmental protocols, conservation, photography, illustration, post-excavation site curation and report writing. While the manual is oriented to the archaeology of Iraq, the approaches are no less applicable to the Middle East more widely, an aim hugely facilitated by the open-source distribution of translations into Arabic and Kurdish.

Numerous metallic artefacts, which anciently were deposited in a hoard, came to light per chance on the campus of the Sultan Qaboos University in Al Khawd, Sultanate of Oman. Mostly fashioned from copper, these arrowheads, axes/adzes, bangles, daggers, knives, socketed lance/ spearheads, metal vessels, razors, rings, swords, and tweezers compare well with numerous documented artefact classes from south-eastern Arabia assigned to the Early Iron Age (1200-300 BCE). Discussion of the international trade between ancient Makan, Dilmun, and Mesopotamia during the 3rd millennium BCE dominates the archaeological literature about Arabia archaeology. The Al Khawd hoard and its contemporaries lend weight to the suggestion that 1st millennium BCE Qade (the name of south-eastern Arabia at that time) was even more important than Bronze Age Makan in terms of the copper trade volume. A reassessment shows the Early Iron Age by no means to be a dark age, but rather an innovative, successful adaptive period characterised by evident population growth.

Dura-Europos, a Parthian-ruled Greco-Syrian city, was captured by Rome c.AD165. It then accommodated a Roman garrison until its destruction by Sasanian siege c.AD256. Excavations of the site between the World Wars made sensational discoveries, and with renewed exploration from 1986 to 2011, Dura remains the best-explored city of the Roman East. A critical revelation was a sprawling Roman military base occupying a quarter of the city's interior. This included swathes of civilian housing converted to soldiers' accommodation and several existing sanctuaries, as well as baths, an amphitheatre, headquarters, and more temples added by the garrison. Base and garrison were clearly fundamental factors in the history of Roman Dura, but what impact did they have on the civil population? Original excavators gloomily portrayed Durenes evicted from their homes and holy places, and subjected to extortion and impoverishment by brutal soldiers, while recent commentators have envisaged military-civilian concordia, with shared prosperity and integration. Detailed examination of the evidence presents a new picture. Through the use of GPS, satellite, geophysical and archival evidence, this volume shows that the Roman military base and resident community were even bigger than previously understood, with both military and civil communities appearing much more internally complex than has been allowed until now. The result is a fascinating social dynamic which we can partly reconstruct, giving us a nuanced picture of life in a city near the eastern frontier of the Roman world.

Contents: 1) New perspectives on Minaean expiatory texts (Alessio Agostini); 2) Investigating an early Islamic landscape on Kuwait Bay: the archaeology of historical Kadhima (Andrew Blair, Derek Kennet & Sultan al-Duwish); 3) The early settlement of HD-5 at Ras al- add, Sultanate of Oman (fourth-third millennium BCE) (Federico Borgi, Elena Maini, Maurizio Cattani & Maurizio Tosi); 4) Known and unknown archaeological monuments in the Dumat al-Jandal oasis in Saudi Arabia: a review (Guillaume Charloux); 5) Prehistory and palaeo-geography of the coastal fringes of the Wahiba Sands and Bar al-Hikman, Sultanate of Oman (Vincent Charpentier, Jean-Francois Berger, Remy Crassard, Marc Lacaze & Gourguen Davtian); 6) Unlocking the Early Bronze Age: attempting to extract Umm an-Nar tombs from a remotely sensed Hafit dataset (poster) (William Deadman); 7) Iron Age impact on a Bronze Age archaeological landscape: results from the Italian Mission to Oman excavations at Salut, Sultanate of Oman (Michele Degli Esposti & Carl Phillips); 8) Late Palaeolithic core-reduction strategies in Dhofar, Oman (Yamandu Hilbert, Jeffrey Rose & Richard Roberts); 9) Reflexions sur les formes de l'ecrit a l'aube de l'Islam (Frederic Imbert); 10) Getting to the bottom of Zabid: the Canadian Archaeological Mission in Yemen, 1982-2011 (Edward J. Keall); 11) New perspectives on regional and interregional obsidian circulation in prehistoric and early historic Arabia (Lamya Khalidi, Krista Lewis & Bernard Gratuze); 12) The Saudi-Italian-French Archaeological Mission at Dumat al-Jandal (ancient Adumatu). A first relative chronological sequence for Dumat al-Jandal. Architecture and pottery (Romolo Loreto); 13) Excavation at the 'Tree of Life' site (Mohammed Redha Ebrahim Hasan Mearaj); 14) The origin of the third-millennium BC fine grey wares found in eastern Arabia (S. Mery, R. Besenval, M.J. Blackman & A. Didier); 15) Building H at Mleiha: new evidence of the late pre-Islamic period D phase (PIR.D) in the Oman peninsula (second to mid-third century AD) (M. Mouton, M. Tengberg, V. Bernard, S. Le Maguer, A. Reddy, D. Soulie, M. Le Grand & J. Goy); 16) An overview of archaeology and heritage in Qatar (Sultan Muhesen, Faisal al-Naimi & Ingolf Thuesen); 17) The construction of Medina's earliest city walls: defence and symbol (Harry Munt); 18) Landscape signatures and seabed characterization in the marine environment of north-west Qatar (poster) (Faisal al-Naimi, Richard Cuttler, Ibrahim Ismail Alhaidous, Lucie Dingwall, Garry Momber, Sadd al-Naimi, Paul Breeze & Ahmed Ali al-Kawari); 19) Towards an annotated corpus of Soqotri oral literature: the 2010 fieldwork season (Vitaly Naumkin, Leonid Kogan & Dmitry Cherkashin (Moscow); A mad Isa al-Darhi & Isa Guman al-Darhi (Soqotra, Yemen); 20) Palace, mosque, and tomb at al-Ruway ah, Qatar (Andrew Petersen & Tony Grey); 21) The origin and development of the oasis landscape of al- Ain (UAE) (Timothy Power & Peter Sheehan); 22) Evidence from a new inscription regarding the goddess (t)rm and some remarks on the gender of deities in South Arabia (Alessia Prioletta); 23) Archaeological excavations at the settlement of al-Furay ah (Freiha), north-west Qatar (Gareth Rees, Faysal al-Naimi, Tobias Richter, Agnieszka Bystron & Alan Walmsley); 24) The 2010-2011 excavation season at al-Zubarah, north-west Qatar (poster) (Tobias Richter, Faisal Abdulla al-Naimi, Lisa Yeomans, Michael House, Tom Collie, Pernille Bangsgaard Jensen, Sandra Rosendahl, Paul Wordsworth & Alan Walmsley); 25) The Great Mosque of Qalhat rediscovered. Main results of the 2008-2010 excavations at Qalhat, Oman (Axelle Rougeulle, Thomas Creissen & Vincent Bernard); 26) A new stone tool assemblage revisited: reconsidering the 'Aterian' in Arabia (Eleanor M.L. Scerri); 27) Egyptian cultural impact on north-west Arabia in the second and first millennia BC (Gunnar Sperveslage & Ricardo Eichmann); 28) The Neolithic site FAY-NE15 in the central region of the Emirate of Sharjah (UAE) (Margarethe Uerpmann, Roland de Beauclair, Marc Handel, Adelina Kutterer, Elisabeth Noack & Hans-Peter Uerpmann); 29) Ka imah remembered: historical traditions of an early Islamic settlement by Kuwait Bay (Brian Ulrich); 30) Yemeni opposition to Ottoman rule: an overview (Abdol Rauh Yaccob).

Plant Food Processing Tools at Early Neolithic Goebekli Tepe reconstructs plant food processing at this key Pre-Pottery Neolithic (9600-8000 BC) site, with an emphasis on cereals, legumes and herbs as food sources, on grinding and pounding tools for their processing, and on the vessels implied in the consumption of meals and beverages. Functional investigations on grinding and pounding tools and on stone containers through use-wear and residue analyses are at the core of the book. Their corpus amounts to more than 7000 objects, constituting thus the largest collection published so far from the Neolithic of Upper Mesopotamia. The spectrum of tools and of processed plants is very broad, but porridges made of cereals, legumes and herbs, and beers predominate over bread-like food. The find contexts show that cooking took place around the well-known monumental buildings, while the large quantity of tools suggests feasting in addition to daily meals.

European adventurers began exploring Palmyra's priceless Roman ruins in the 17th century, but it wasn't until the advent of photography that the public became aware of its scale and majesty. In 1885, the sight of Palmyra astounded members of the Wolfe Expedition as they journeyed home from Mesopotamia. The group's photographer, John Henry Haynes, documented the monumental temples, tombs and colonnades in more than a hundred invaluable images. Since then, Haynes and his work have largely been forgotten, and the forces of the self-styled Islamic State have destroyed the key monuments of this world-renowned site, including the glorious Temple of Bel. Haynes's images of Palmyra - published here for the first time - are all the more poignant. The Syrian city of Palmyra - known as ‘the Pearl of the Desert’ - was one of the most important cultural centres of the ancient world. A key stop on the Silk Road, it was a vital link between the East and the West, and a prize fought over by successive conquering armies.

This Handbook aims to serve as a research guide to the archaeology of the Levant, an area situated at the crossroads of the ancient world that linked the eastern Mediterranean, Anatolia, Mesopotamia, and Egypt. The Levant as used here is a historical geographical term referring to a large area which today comprises the modern states of Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, western Syria, and Cyprus, as well as the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and the Sinai Peninsula. Unique in its treatment of the entire region, it offers a comprehensive overview and analysis of the current state of the archaeology of the Levant within its larger cultural, historical, and socio-economic contexts. The Handbook also attempts to bridge the modern scholarly and political divide between archaeologists working in this highly contested region. Written by leading international scholars in the field, it focuses chronologically on the Neolithic through Persian periods - a time span during which the Levant was often in close contact with the imperial powers of Egypt, Anatolia, Assyria, Babylon, and Persia. This volume will serve as an invaluable reference work for those interested in a contextualised archaeological account of this region, beginning with the 'agricultural revolution' until the conquest of Alexander the Great that marked the end of the Persian period.

This book presents a detailed overview of the firearms used in Oman over the last four centuries. Portable firearms were brought into the Arabian Gulf by the Portuguese, but there is no trace of these early weapons the region. In Oman, the typical matchlock guns with decorated Indian barrels were highly esteemed and they were passed from generation to generation as a family heritage. Matchlock guns were replaced only by breech-loading Martini Henry rifles at the end of the 19th century, when Muscat became the major firearms' entrepot in the Arabian Gulf with hundreds of thousands of breech loading rifles re-exported throughout the whole region up to Afghanistan and Persia. The Martini Henry rifle and its variants were by far the most common weapon and Belgian made Martini Henry were specifically engraved for the Muscat market. Cannon entered the country in great number mostly as ordnances on Royal Navy ships and they are now kept in forts, towers and fortified buildings across the entire Oman. The weapons described in this book are mostly from the National Museum and Bait al Zubair Museum in Muscat.

The first edition of In the Shadow of the Ancestors (2007) was the first and only summary of decades of archaeological research in the Oman Peninsula. This second expanded had a long and winding journey toward publication. The passing away of Serge Cleuziou not long after the release of the first edition left Maurizio Tosi alone in completing this challenging enterprise. For this reason, and out of respect for his lifelong friend and colleague, he decided not to intervene too extensively on the main contents, but to add instead to the original eleven chapters a number of new ‘windows’ written by other scholars, in order to include more recent research and interpretations. In addition to the main contents, the new contributions by this younger generation of scholars, most of whom were students and collaborators of Cleuziou and Tosi, offers great testament to the legacy the authors leave behind them.

The Mystery of the Hanging Garden of Babylon is an exciting story of detection involving legends, expert decipherment of ancient texts, and a vivid description of a little-known civilization. Recognized in ancient times as one of the Seven Wonders of the World, the legendary Hanging Garden of Babylon and its location have long been steeped in mystery and puzzling myths. In this remarkable volume Stephanie Dalley, a world expert on ancient Babylonian language, exposes new evidence and clarifies all the known material about this enigmatic World Wonder. Placing the Garden within a tradition of royal patronage, Dalley describes how the decipherment of an original text and its link to sculpture in the British Museum has enabled her to pin down where and by which king the Garden was laid out, and to describe in detail what it looked like. Through this dramatic and fascinating reconstruction of the Garden, Dalley also follows its influence on later garden design. Unscrambling layer by layer the many stories that have built up around the Garden, including the parts played by Semiramis and Nebuchadnezzar, Dalley shows why this Garden deserves its place alongside the Pyramids and the Colossus of Rhodes as one of the most astonishing technical achievements of the ancient world.

In late summer 2017, ongoing Turkish excavations at the site of Teos in Ionia uncovered one of the largest and most important Greek inscriptions to have been discovered this century. It records, in thrilling and moving detail, the assistance provided by the Teians in the repopulation and rebuilding of their daughter-city, Abdera in Thrace, after its sack by the Romans in 170 BC during the Third Macedonian War. The new text, published here for the first time, is startling testimony to the ancestral friendship- and support-networks that existed between Greek poleis in the Hellenistic world, and includes (among other things) the longest surviving description of an honorific statue to survive from the ancient world. In the light of the new inscription, the authors offer a full reassessment of the epigraphic and literary evidence for relations between Teos and Abdera, thereby providing a comprehensive long-term history of the two cities, from the sixth to the second century BC. The book also includes major new editions of the 'Teian Dirae' (public curses at Teos and Abdera in the early fifth century BC) and the second-century decree of Abdera for the Teian ambassadors Amymon and Megathymos, as well as two further new texts from the sanctuary of Dionysos at Teos.

The archaeological excavations along the route of packages 3 and 4 of the Batinah Expressway, Sultanate of Oman, conducted during the spring and summer of 2014, recorded over 60 archaeological sites over the 200km stretch of roadway cutting through the Batinah plain, north-west of Muscat. The majority of these sites were prehistoric tombs of varying ages. These excavations have allowed a re-thinking of the dating of some of these tombs, looking particularly at the structural styles of the tombs as well as their location in the landscape. It has also demonstrated techniques of rapid yet reliable excavation and recording techniques adapted from UK commercial archaeology for the Omani conditions. The report builds on the work of academic studies and adds a large dataset to the archaeology of the Batinah, Oman and the wider region. It is hoped that this will allow a wider scale reconsideration of the burial styles of the prehistoric Gulf.

The Neolithic Cemetery at Tell el-Kerkh is the second volume of the final reports on the excavations at Tell el-Kerkh, northwest Syria. The 12-year field campaigns at Tell el-Kerkh yielded several unexpected archaeological findings. The existence of the oldest cultural deposits from the early Pre-Pottery Neolithic B period (c. 8700-8300 BC) in northwestern Syria was revealed. The investigations also revealed that several large and complex societies had existed from the late Pre-Pottery Neolithic B to the middle Pottery Neolithic periods (c. 7600-6000 BC). One of the most conspicuous findings of the excavations at Tell el-Kerkh was the discovery of a Pottery Neolithic cemetery dating between c. 6400 and 6100 BC, which makes it one of the oldest outdoor communal cemeteries in West Asia. This book focuses specifically on this cemetery. It reports the discovery of over 240 burials and discusses the process of the formation and development of the cemetery. Initially used for traditional house burials in a corner of the settlement, the cemetery eventually became a graveyard that was physically separated from the residential buildings and consisted only of graves. In other words, burials that were deeply related to each house developed into an outdoor communal cemetery of the settlement. The Kerkh Neolithic cemetery was a precursor to the wider development of communal cemeteries in West Asia, and its investigation provides us with a deeper understanding of Neolithic society in West Asia.

This book explores pottery making and communities during the Bakun period (c. 5000 - 4000 BCE) in the Kur River Basin, Fars province, southwestern Iran, through the analysis of ceramic materials collected at Tall-e Jari A, Tall-e Gap, and Tall-e Bakun A & B. Firstly, it reconsiders the stratigraphy and radiocarbon dates of the four sites by reviewing the descriptions of excavation trenches, then presents a new chronological relationship between the sites. The book sets out diachronic changes in the the Bakun pottery quantitatively, namely the increase of black-on-buff ware and the gradual shift of vessel forms. It also presents analyses of pottery-making techniques, painting skills, petrography, and geochemistry and clarifies minor changes in the chai nes ope ratoires and major changes in painting skill. Finally, the book discusses the organisation of pottery production from a relational perspective. It concludes that the more fixed community of pottery making imposed longer apprenticeship periods and that social inequality also increased.

Glass-Making in the Ancient Near East explores glass composition and production from the mid-second to mid-first millennia BC, essentially the first thousand years of glass-making. Multi-element analyses of 132 glasses from Pella in Jordan, and Nuzi and Nimrud in Iraq (ancient Mesopotamia), produce new and important data that provide insights into the earliest glass production. A novel method for data interpretation and presentation has been developed and used to characterise the glass types and to investigate questions of composition, raw materials, regional differences and similarities, and changes through time from the earliest consistent glass manufacture as represented at 16th century BC Pella, which is compared with Late Bronze Age Nuzi, to the Iron Age at both Pella and Nimrud. These compositional data are compared with available glass compositional data from the widespread regions of the Levant, Mesopotamia, Egypt, Iran and France, uncovering fascinating connections that, when placed in the archaeological context, reveal much about glass production, raw material sources, and distribution of finished and raw glasses. Technological innovations, including the introduction of natron-fluxed glasses, early decolouring with antimony, and the use of Egyptian cobalt colourant in Near Eastern glasses, are explored as part of this unique investigation of the critical developments in sophisticated and complex glass-making that laid the foundations for the establishment of large-scale production in the ensuing Hellenistic and Roman periods.

First published in the 1750s, The Ruins of Palmyra and The Ruins of Baalbek are a remarkable record of an expedition to the Levant by three antiquarians - Robert Wood, John Bouverie and James Dawkins - along with a draftsman, Giovanni Battista Borra. With over 100 engravings of the classical architecture of the two ancient cities of Palmyra and Baalbek, the volumes represent the earliest-known examples of monographs on archaeological sites. They were unique in providing systematic discussion of the sites' physical and human geography alongside two kinds of pictorial evidence: views of the ancient sites in their then-present state and detailed plans, with measurements, of architectural features. This new approach was immediately copied by antiquarians in the later 18th century and also had great influence upon Neoclassical architecture in Britain, Europe and North America. This new edition features reproductions of all the engravings from the original publications and includes a new introduction by noted scholar, Benjamin Anderson (Cornell University, USA).

This book investigates the founding and building of cities in the ancient Near East. The creation of new cities was imagined as an ideological project or a divine intervention in the political narratives and mythologies of Near Eastern cultures, often masking the complex processes behind the social production of urban space. During the Early Iron Age (c.1200-850 BCE), Assyrian and Syro-Hittite rulers developed a highly performative official discourse that revolved around constructing cities, cultivating landscapes, building watercourses, erecting monuments and initiating public festivals. This volume combs through archaeological, epigraphic, visual, architectural and environmental evidence to tell the story of a region from the perspective of its spatial practices, landscape history and architectural technologies. It argues that the cultural processes of the making of urban spaces shape collective memory and identity as well as sites of political performance and state spectacle.

Qidfa' 1: Excavation of a Late Prehistoric Tomb, Fujairah Emirate, United Arab Emirates presents results from the rescue excavations of the Qidfa' 1 site, a multi-period tomb (Wadi Suq-Late Bronze /Early Iron Age). The architecture of the two-storey structure and the material culture found in the U-shaped tomb are presented to establish a chronology for the site, and its importance for archaeology in the Fujairah Emirate is discussed. The data obtained and the diversity of the materials discovered contribute to a better understanding of the changes that took place in south-east Arabia during the 2nd millennium BC. The principle aim of the report is therefore to discuss the funeral architecture and present the finds, especially those which came from the intact upper chambers, such as pottery vessels, stone vessels and copper/bronze vessels, in addition to other artefacts such as daggers, axes, adzes, bangles, anklets, arrowheads and other personal items. The richness of the discoveries demonstrates the wealth and significance of the culture of the 2nd millennium BC in southeast Arabia. By disseminating the results of this important but previously unpublished excavation the book will open a window for further discussions.

The Sasanian empire was one of the great powers of Late Antiquity, and for four centuries ruled the vast region stretching from Syria and the Caucasus to Central Asia. Classical, Armenian, Jewish and Arab written sources throw light on its history, and studies of its rock reliefs, stuccoes, silver, silks, coins and glyptic have created a picture of a rich courtly culture with a strong Iranian character. However, the everyday material culture is much less understood, as is the economy which sustained and supported the Sasanian empire and underpinned its consistent military superiority over its western rivals. This collection of essays looks at these aspects and offers an approach based almost entirely on archaeological and scientific research, much presented here for the first time. This book is divided into three parts which in turn examine evidence for Sasanian sites, settlements and landscapes, their complex agricultural resources, and their crafts and industries. Each section is preceded by an essay setting out the wider research questions and current state of knowledge. The book begins and ends with a general introduction and conclusion setting out why this new approach is necessary, and how it helps change our perceptions of the complexity and power of the Sasanian empire.

In 1961 archaeologists discovered a family archive of legal papyri in a cave near the Dead Sea where their owner, the Jewish woman Babatha, had hidden them in 135 CE at the end of the Bar Kokhba revolt. Babatha's Orchard analyzes the oldest four of these papyri to argue that underlying them is a hitherto undetected and surprising train of events concerning how Babatha's father, Shim'on, purchased a date-palm orchard in Maoza on the southern shore of the Dead Sea in 99 CE that he later gave to Babatha. The central features of the story, untold for two millennia, relate to how a high Nabatean official had purchased the orchard only a month before, but suddenly rescinded the purchase, and how Shim'on then acquired it, in enlarged form, from the vendor. Teasing out the details involves deploying the new methodology of archival ethnography, combined with a fresh scrutiny of the papyri (written in Nabatean Aramaic), to investigate the Nabatean and Jewish individuals mentioned and their relationships within the social, ethnic, economic, and political realities of Nabatea at that time. Aspects of this context which are thrown into sharp relief by Babatha's Orchard include: the prominence of wealthy Nabatean women and their husbands' financial reliance on them; the high returns and steep losses possible in date cultivation; the sophistication of Nabatean law and lawyers; the lingering effect of the Nabateans' nomadic past in lessening the social distance between elite and non-elite; and the good ethnic relations between Nabateans and Jews.